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INTERIM REPORT

Conceptual and Cultural Contexts

VILLAGE India has figured prominently in sociological literature. The British administrator-scholars were pioneers in this field of study. For instance, Baden-Powell wrote about the autonomous self-sufficient villages. Sir Henry Maine developed a theory of primitive communism of property, on the basis of his study of Indian village. Sir Charles Metcalfe found that "India’s village communities are little republics, having nearly every thing they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds revolution, but the village community remains the same. This union of village communities, each one forming a separate little state in itself, has contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India". W.H. Wiser drew attention to the importance of the jajmani system, as prevalent in the villages of the United Provinces. The "static village" is a point made by almost all the scholars associated with the British Raj.

In post-Independence India, in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of anthropologists and sociologists from the United Kingdom, U.S.A., and India contributed to village studies. Prominent among them were F.G. Bailey, Kathleen Gough, Eric J. Miller, William H. Newell, Collin Rosser, Marian W. Smith, Alan R. Beals, McKim Marriott, David G. Mandelbaum, G. Morris Carstairs. S.C. Dube and M.N. Srinivas. Most of them reflected on the institution of caste and on social stratification. Today, the large-scale study of village development plans is in focus. This has taken a large number of scholars and non-governmental organizations to the villages. Their studies have marvelled at the grandeur of caste and the grand projects of development, but none appears to have reached into the heart of village India.

In 1959 Nirmal Kumar Bose launched a major project of village study under the auspices of the Anthropological Survey of India. Data were collected from 311 out of 322 districts of India during the field seasons of October 1959 to March 1960 and October 1960 to March 1961. Although in most instances only one village was studied per district, there were some cases where more than one village was surveyed for representing important variations due to ecological or ethnic differentiation in the different portions of the district. Thus, altogether 430 villages were studied. In studying the village, data on the following traits were collected: settlement pattern, house types, diet, dress, ornaments and footwear, common means of transport of goods and passengers, domesticated animals and birds, crops grown, common oil press, common basketry and pottery, village census, occupations, markets attended, God and festivals, village sanitation and hygienic practices. The fieldwork was done by 16 persons under the leadership of Surajit Chandra Sinha. The data from the field were transferred to cards of 9" X 5". The 19 items in the original schedule were broken down into 41 headings. A preliminary report based on 11 selected traits, viz. settlement pattern, house type, food, fats or oils used, costumes of men and women, footwear, bullock-carts, ploughs, husking implements, and oil press was published. The main findings of this extraordinary work, in the words of Bose, were as follows:

One is struck by a general accordance between the findings in regard to various items of material culture in rural India. Firstly, there is a certain measure of local differentiation; and there is also a considerable amount of interpenetration in almost every case. Secondly, the boundaries of the culture areas or sub-areas do not tally with Grierson’s boundaries of either linguistic families like Indo-Aryan and Dravidian or of branches within either of these families. Material items of culture seem to have independent extensions of their own; and these, very roughly, tend to be in accord with one another. On their basis, India becomes divided very roughly into two distinguishable, but overlapping, regions meeting at a broad zone which runs from Maharashtra to Bihar in some cases and to Orissa or West Bengal in others. This broad belt has also been the area where several material traits have interpenetrated again and again bringing about changes in form or function.

...Styles present in India have affiliation with styles in neighbouring countries. The presence of one or two special varieties of the plough and yoke, and of portable multi-socketed wooden mortars for husking paddy takes us over to some portions of South-east Asia. And similar affinities can be drawn in relation to domestic architecture between India and Sumatra .

...It appears that relationships can be established on their basis as much with South-east Asia as with countries lying to the west and north-west of India.

India has been a land where cultures have mingled after flowing in from both the west and the east. But what is original is that new combinations have taken place here, and sometimes even new inventions.

...This regionalism seems to be on the whole independent of language as well as of physical types.

If regionalism is in evidence to a certain extent in relation to the material arts of life, it is apparent already that the degree of differentiation is less in respect of the country’s social organization.

The structure of Indian unity can, therefore, be compared to a pyramid. There is more differentiation at the material base of life and progressively less as one mounts higher and higher. It is needless to say that the implication is not that village people are more different from one another than city people or sophisticated and propertied class; but that, whether it is a villager or a dweller of Indian towns, there is more variety in regard to some aspects of life and less in relation to others.

Peasant Life in India: A Study in Indian Unity and Diversity, by N.K. Bose, Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, 1961.

Bose’s spirit remains a quantum level stimulus associated with the present work. Some of the material traits examined by Bose have been included, particularly with a view to measuring the extent of change over 40 years. But within his framework of enquiry, the approach of this study has a personal outlook. For instance, in the 1959 village studies, the District was the unit and the village was selected by the random sampling method. The main objective of that study was to identify the culture zones of India. The unit of the present study is the State, and a modified method of purposive sampling, aimed at identifying the form and nature of India’s cultural heritage, has been followed. Bose’s thesis on the "unity in diversity" of material culture has a wide sweep and strengthens the consistent viewpoint of Indian unity. The present study looks for internal evidence of the person who remains the trigger of action, the prime mover of culture. This is the new dimension that has been added to the study of village India.

Earlier writers classified Indian villages on the basis of the prevailing land tenure system. Two types of villages were described: the "joint" and the "severally". The first type is found in the North-West Frontier Province, the Punjab and the United Provinces, and the second in Peninsular and Central India. The latter type also existed in Bengal and Bihar before the permanent settlement in 1793. The "joint" type may be further subdivided into the pattidari and the zamindari sub-types, in both of which the village lands are the joint property of an organized proprietary body. In a "joint" village, there are two classes of men, one with proprietary rights, the other without them, power resting exclusively with the former. In the "severally" or roytwari village, a type which prevails over the greater part of India, the unit of land revenue is not the village, but the holding of each land-holder, which is separately assessed, and each land-holder is individually responsible for its payment. There is no waste land held in common which can be divided if required for cultivation, though there may be common rights of use in the waste, e.g., for grazing and for collecting fuel. In South India there are two types of villages. The most prevalent is the mirasi village, where the land is owned in small amounts by a number of separate patrilineal joint families. The other type is the inami village, which dates from the Maharatta conquest (1674 - 1799) when the Maharatta kings made grants of whole villages to individual families of Tamil Brahmans, to immigrant Maharattas and to religious institutions. In the inami village, the "Brahman village", land is owned by the several families in a Brahman street called an agraharam. In Orissa, the "Brahman settlement", called a sasan, were established by different kings, particularly the Gajapati Rajas. In North Bihar, there are two types of land called brahmottar, gifted to the Brahman, and devottar, gifted to the temple.

The relation between land and people has an important bearing on the economic life of the village, but such a fluid category of alliance can do little with the cultural personality of a village. What counts in the village culture is the wisdom tradition, the value system, and the local ontology that has been handed down from times immemorial. A complex system of cultural structures is indentified with art and architecture, religion and specialized knowledge, human behaviour, environmental conditions, and so on. Taking a holistic view, the present study addresses itself to the "heritage village" which has its own version of the great tradition. It is a repository of the wisdom tradition, a microcosm of India’s cosmocentric culture.

Village India 

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